Inside the Sydney Opera House Project

28/11/2012 , 10:36 PM by Dominic Knight

It's the project that's fascinated Sydney for decades - and we're still talking about it. I was raised hearing the tales about Joern Utzon's visionary design for the Sydney Opera House, and how he'd quit before it was constructed due to political infighting, and consequently never actually clapped eyes on his masterpiece.

Then, years later, in what was in some respects an act of redemption, the NSW Government re-engaged Utzon and his son Jan to renovate the building and formulate guidelines for preserving it into the future. The architectural genius reunited with his most famous creation - a happy ending, perhaps.

The story's much more complicated than that, of course. And a new website, The Opera House Project, reveals the history of this remarkable building using archival photographs, sound and video.

Its innovative use of cutting edge web development techniques immerses the viewer/listener/reader in the history, and it's designed to work on any size screen from a smartphone to a home television.

I spoke to the writer/director of the Opera House Project, Sam Doust from ABC Innovation. I asked him how he sifted through the vast amount of archival material, and how he approached the challenge of presenting it in a logical and easily navigable fashion in what is still an evolving medium.